Right down to the point, A-10 Cuba! is a fairly hard-core flight sim (with the odd exception that the ‘hog will survive an inadvertent touch and go landing with little damage, as when one slightly misjudges the height of a hill!) which eschews texture mapping and smooth shading for a high frame rate. It runs flawlessly on a low-end 100 MHz Pentium, and can go much lower than that, but in consequence the graphics are really blocky. But the environment is at least very much “alive.” As you taxi down the runway, a wing of F-16s will zoom overhead, on their way to some unknown mission. Fly near a city and you see cars driving around.

The flight model seems quite accurate, with the feel of the plane changing depending on weapons loadout or damage (lost half your wing?). Blackouts, wind shear, sun glare…all the standards are here. It’s not flawless, however, but the greatest flaw isn’t from the game itself but rather from its packaging. Activision seemed to have forgotten to write a proper manual for this game.

Assuming you’re already versed in these sort of flight games and have a proper joystick set up, the only other complaints revolve around the graphics and generally small number of missions and lack of any kind of editor, with only multiplayer providing further gameplay.